Remember it? Perhaps, like me, you cringe in hindsight. Chubby’s dad takes her on a motorbike ride, and they go so fast the wind nearly blows Chubby’s fat face off. At the punch line, we’d stretch our cheeks back fast and tight, our eyes bulging from their sockets, then shout: “Slow down, Daddy!”

There was a time when fat jokes were funny, acceptable, possibly even cool. Will Smith was constantly making fun of his rich uncle’s girth on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and how can anyone forget the tedious stream of “yo mama so fat” knee-slappers?

My childhood was before the anti-bullying campaigns; kids got “picked on” but sucked it up because it put hair on their chests. It was a time when being overweight was the exception in schools and god help the playground “fatso” or “lardball.” Many of the slurs were worse.

Fat jokes, thankfully, are no longer PC (with the rather cruel exception of Toronto’s mayor). We’re a hypersensitive society when it comes to body size, thanks no doubt to mounting obesity rates. But fat scorn is alive and well, and not just among children on playgrounds. It’s moved up a cruel rung on the generation ladder. with parents of overweight children getting judged for “failing” to keep their child’s weight in check.

I recently spoke to Dara-Lynn Weiss, author of The Heavy (2013, Ballantine Books), about the weight-related judgment parents face. Weiss knows all about fat scorn, though in her case it was more the reverse. The Manhattan mom’s little girl packed on a whopping 23 pounds between the ages of six and seven and was pronounced obese by a doctor. So Weiss put the girl on a diet and wrote a controversial story about it in Vogue (this was the basis for The Heavy).

Worst mom in New York, worst mom in America, worst mom in the world; Weiss heard no end of insults. Critics ripped her to shreds, arguing she’d used shame as a tactic to deal with her daughter’s weight issues, that she’d transferring her own body images issues to her child, that she’d taught Bea to believe she’d only be loved if she was thin.

The reaction, says Weiss, is partly because the topics addressed in The Heavy are contentious ones, personal ones, emotional ones. “We’re talking about parenting, we’re talking about motherhood, we’re talking about dieting and weight and body image and food and little girls and their relationships to their bodies,” Weiss says.

Still, she was shocked at the extreme reaction, mainly because she was honestly trying to help her daughter be healthy. “Who wouldn’t want to help an obese child lose weight? Why would anyone question this decision?”

Since The Heavy was published in January, Weiss has mainly heard empathy and gratitude, from parents who feel “heaped with scorn” because their child is obese. “You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” she says.

And doubly damned if you put it in the public sphere for everyone else to pick apart. Some would argue Weiss was asking for trouble by writing about it (and she was, “on some unconscious level,” trying to provocative with the Vogue article, she tells me).

But I admire her for putting her story out there, for sparking a debate, even if she made herself the tennis ball getting whacked around the court. She is honest, the first to point to her own imperfections. For example, until Bea had a weight problem, Weiss admits she looked down on the parents of fat kids. “A lack of discipline or a failure to set limits was at play,” is, in the book, how she describes her old way of thinking.

“These people were either actively feeding their children badly, or passively letting their children feed themselves badly … Logic told me they were to blame.”

But as Bea’s weight ballooned to the upper extreme of the growth charts, Weiss began to worry. Mostly, it was about her daughter’s health and future. (One kid in the school had already taken to calling the six-year-old child “Fatty Patty.”)

But Weiss worried, too, as the parent of the heaviest kid in the class, about judgment. “Sure, I wondered what other moms thought about me, and how they might judge my actions or inaction,” she writes.

That she owns up to that is refreshing. Because surely every parent has enjoyed some secret moment of superciliousness — on the bus, at the playground, from the comfort of the armchair reading something on the Internet. We all think we know the best way. Which is good. Because parenting demands confidence.

At the same time, no matter how hard we try to rise above the stinkeye, to tune out the whispers, it seems others’ views (nice, not so nice) seep their way into the fabric of how we parent.

And this annoys me. Parenting is hard enough without trying to please the whole planet, which by the way isn’t even possible.

Weiss has shed her judgments of other fat kids’ parents and has done her very best not to let other people’s opinions dent her confidence.

“People feel adamantly about their point of view, whatever it is, and react very strongly when they see a parent, however well meaning, doing something they think is absolutely the wrong way to go about it,” she says of the extreme reaction she faced.

By the way, it worked. The diet. Bea shed the excess pounds and continues to maintain a healthy body weight. Weiss stands by her decision. “Part of being a parent is being the nagging, annoying force for good in your child.”

And part of being a parent, unfortunately, is living with critics, and tuning it out if need be. Easier said, written, than done.

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